Sometimes it’s hard to remain unattached. The secret is to release as you notice it and keep doing it. Patiently, repeatedly, endlessly if necessary. It’s that willingness to let go when you see you’re grasping, contracting, resisting.
The practice is notice and release or notice and return. Or even notice and allow. There’s no force in any of this. It’s gentle consistency that leads to natural abidance. Keep coming back to this time after time until quite naturally you’ll find that you never leave it and you remain forever as That.
Why wish for anything past this moment? This moment is full enough. Vast and full.
Know that underneath all the “drudgery and broken dreams” is the Self. So when you find yourself broken open and cracked-up and you and your world have collapsed, there is Self.
Rest there as That.
Find the bliss of the Self. Find the source of happiness and peace inside you. Find God in your heart. And in doing so you see the sacred everywhere in everything.
Bliss is already here. But all our habitual conditioned focus on outwardness at the expense of the living ground of our experiencing robs us of our sense of fullness and joy. We need to unlearn the habits of attention and seeking that actually lead us away from our intrinsic happiness.
Unfortunately the whole edifice of human life is constructed on the notion of filling a (mis)perceived lack in ourselves. And when push comes to shove we tend to insist on continuing forth in the outward direction on the off-chance that one day it will finally pay off. Good luck with that.
Examining the process of desiring itself is fascinating. The presence of desire offers a world of information and insight. Wanting, born of perceived lack, enacted through a proxy, is dissolved in the clarity that what we truly want is always already present. So desire is born of misperception and misapprehension.
And so we could use the presence of desire as a jumping off point to return to its source and experience its fulfilment. It’s all a question of which direction we go when faced with the arising of a desire: outwards into the field of endless seeking, or inwards to the desire’s source and thereby to its fulfilment and dissolution.
(The common objection to this way of thinking is that by not following our desires out into ‘the world’ and seeking to fulfil them that way we’ll all end up on sofas all day and nothing will ever get done. But life goes on and it’s worth making the distinction between lack-based wanting and inspired action.)
I met a guy once who cured his smoking addiction by sleeping all the time. Every time he wanted a cigarette he’d just go to bed and sleep. He did this for about two years until finally the addiction was out of his system, both body and mind.
But this demonstrated that his fervent desire didn’t need to be fulfilled and instead of giving in to its proximate fulfilment he short-circuited the whole thing by opting out of consciousness altogether until it passed.
He was certainly original.
Most people just don’t know how to sit with strong emotions or feelings without either acting-out on them, suppressing them or avoiding them by trying to change them. They don’t seem to be able or willing to just let them be present without adding to or interfering with them.
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